A conversation with Indian Horse author Richard Wagamese

Richard Wagamese, one of our nation’s most compelling authors, was scheduled to accept MacEwan University’s Book of the Year prize last spring when a hole opened up on his right hand, his writing hand.

EDMONTON – Richard Wagamese, one of our nation’s most compelling authors, was scheduled to accept MacEwan University’s Book of the Year prize last spring when a hole opened up on his right hand, his writing hand.

The Wabaseemoong First Nation Ojibwe was told to prepare to lose it. “It was a huge hole,” laughs the 59-year-old now. “When I was in the hospital, I could see right into my hand!”

Diagnosed with a cellulitis infection, the award-winning writer has since fully recovered, so on Tuesday he will finally do a reading at MacEwan from Indian Horse, his moving story of Saul, a young Ojibwe boy ripped from the arms of his frozen grandmother and subjected to the horrors of 1960s residential schools, where hockey superficially frees him.

Wagamese is a straightforward, soulful man who lives just outside Kamloops, B.C. His One Native Life memoir, Indian Horse and the recently released Medicine Walk should be required reading for their inspiring mixture of tension, confrontation and triumph.

Q: It must be nice to have Indian Horse keep on giving back, a book from 2012 being honoured a couple years later in Edmonton of all places.

A: Right from the very beginning the universality of the story caught everybody. Aside from residential schools, there have been a whole lot of people who’ve undergone something in their life that has been carried forward unknowingly. People have had to sort out the detritus, the debris of all of that.

Q: Have you heard about Cree elder Gary Moostoos getting kicked out of the downtown mall while simply eating noodles? The mall apologized to him but he said he couldn’t accept that apology until he’d seen some real change in the next six months, perhaps. What do you think of all this?

A: Hmmm, an apology is recognition of some shortfall that resulted in somebody being offended or injured. It has two parts. It’s the words, and then it’s the actions that show you’re willing to change that behaviour. The elder is right. Words are cheap in the long run. What matters is the action in the long run.

A: Joshua is 19 and Jason is 34 and we’re building a relationship because of the years of absence. My greatest wish for my sons is they can see the places where I met with my own shortfalls and places where my own lack of experience and my own lack of a power of choice has resulted in being in circumstances I normally wouldn’t wish for myself. I hope they can see my whole story as a map for them. I hope when they hold my writing, a book in their hands, particularly Medicine Walk, they’re holding a big part of my soul.

Q: It’s sure hard to talk to your dad sometimes …

A: Joshua got hold of me on Facebook one day and said, “I have a new girlfriend and we’re going on a first date and I want to ask you a question.” I thought, “wow! This is really cool! My son is asking me a question about girls!” He asked if it was OK on a first date to hold hands.

I thought, “This is amazing! I’ve been waiting 19 years for this!” I wrote back, “Joshua, it’s perfectly all right if on your first date you hold hands. As long as they’re your own.”

(Laughs.) He wrote, “BAHAHA!” So that’s a sign to me how displacement and years of separation can close, and how people can become family if there’s a willingness on both sides.

Q: No spoilers, but Franklin (the protagonist in Medicine Walk) isn’t quite fixed at the end of the book. You’ve hinted at a sequel — what do you imagine he might try and resolve next?

A: It’s being written as we speak. At the end of the story, when I walked away from it — a couple of days — I realized there was more that had to be told. My publisher and my agent agreed it was a good idea. I’m 85 pages into it. It’s called Starlight, his family name.

Q: You never met your father. Is this one of the reasons you frequently write about visions of seeing ancestors, phantom tribes on the riverbanks?

A: There are certain people who are blessed with the ability to see visions or things of that ilk; I’m not one of them. But I am one of the people who have the ability to sense and feel things around me, whether it’s historic energy or place energy or people’s energy. When I’m on the land, it affects me so viscerally and spiritually and emotionally that I’m just wide open to it. When I write about the land it seems only natural to include that perception, and offer that to my characters.

Q: We have some interesting white mentors in your books, like the old man in Medicine Walk and of course Father Leboutilier in Indian Horse, who obviously has an extremely mixed and complicated impact on Saul.

A: After 59 years on the planet, the people who have gone on to shape my journey have been a mixed bag. There have been Ojibwe elders, Cree-Dene elders, Sioux elders. But there have also been Hungarians, Romanians, Germans and Scots. To write about a life without outside influences seems to me to write about a life that’s not concluded yet. When we open ourselves to experience, we don’t say, “I’m opening myself to only brown experience.” We would rob ourselves of a whole amazing width and breadth and scope of information that could help us along the way.

Q: Indian Horse was particularly brilliant in that you used the great common denominator of hockey to make anyone, even someone prone to bigotry, fall in love with Saul. I wonder if you think about that while you’re writing it. Even the staunchest redneck loves a good underdog hockey story.

A: I’m basically trying to entertain myself as much as possible. I got quite a chuckle out of Saul finding himself as an aboriginal man on a sheer white surface. That’s a metaphor for Canada! All of us aboriginal people have to find a definition of ourselves against a largely white background.

Q: Pierre Trudeau said every Canadian should go canoeing. Do you recommend everyone go out and live on the land for awhile? I know you did that, in the context of healing yourself.

A: We say we are Canadian, that we are proud of it. We owe it to ourselves to go stand on it, someplace that’s free and open, feel the wind that blows across it, smell the trees and flowers and lakes. That’s how we come to know it. You don’t come to know it standing on concrete or in a condominium in downtown Vancouver.

Q: How do you feel about the word Indian — it’s a complicated word that depends on a lot of things, isn’t it?

A: (Laughs.) I really like what Lenny Bruce said a long time ago, that if the president came on TV and said the N-word over and over till it lost its power, it would just be a word. For me, the way we are referred to by non-aboriginal people doesn’t really have an impact on me because I know who and what I am. Slurs — they just kind of slide off my back these days. I’m too old to pick a fight, I can’t run as fast, and I’m more a man of peace than I was in my younger days. What’s a word, anyways? It’s our weakest form of communication. Our strongest form of communication is our feelings and our spirituality.

Q: How is the hand?

A: There’s a huge scar on the back where they had to actually drill into it to flush out all the poisons. They said that I should be prepared to lose it; it was that dire. For months I couldn’t travel because I had to be in the clinic having it dressed for about three months. It’s amazing what the body is capable of.

Q: Did you have any epiphanies?

A: You have to reconsider what your life is going to be like without a hand. I had to think to myself, maybe I won’t be able to write. Is writing the definition of who I am? The answer I came up with is I’m not just a writer. I’m a whole lot of other things.

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